Moyao Ma

Week 1

Knowing the idea of sustainability, I did noticed many artists have taken this idea into their work.

Artist such as Leon Ferrari created multiple prints and collage them with newspaper. it not only fit into the idea of sustainability but also created different texture and depth into his works.

On Thursday, I tried to make my own prints using recycled materials. I decided to use the surface of a plastic bottle. For the first one, I first painted the background the colour I like. Then I dipped the clean bottle onto the wet surface. It takes off the wet paint from the darker shade region and bring it to the lighter shade region. For the second one, I coloured the bottle surface with different colour and stamped it onto the paper.

I then tried to use the reused acetate and put paint on it. I then pressed the two sheets together then remove it. I really like the outcome of how the colours were mixed. It also create a veiny texture using the paint.

Week 2 Emerging Technology In Fashion

Due to emerging advancement of technology, the fashion industry has adopt many of it. Such as visual reality fashion, and 3D modeling. As a student studying print textile, i also uses such tools in my work. Maybe yet to be so advanced into AI or 3D modeling but using basic tools such as photoshop and illustrator. Personally I feel that using photoshop is very useful when it comes to making repeating elements as I do not have to redraw the same thing over and over again. Also it allows me to try out my motif in different scale. It is extremely useful when it comes to mirroring or flipping the image. It saves a lot of time redrawing and tracing from my original work. It is also a helpful tool when it comes to trying out different form of overlapping.

In my work I usually loves creating patterns thats are symmetrical. I usally draw a quater of it and use photoshop to mirror the image to create the motif I want.

This is one of my favourite work I have done in the past where I use this technique. This print was inspired by traditional lion dance and also influenced my motif with filigree. This is also made with my personal favourite medium, water colour as base colour and gel pen on top for the motif.

In the current project, I extract motif of the highlights of the water crease. I got my colour pallet from water that reflect colourful light hence I am using this pinkish colour as my background. There are two background I had tried, one is fully covered with water colour shown as above. The other one is the partially covered with water colour merged with a lot of water on paper. I drawn this in a small scale with only a quarter. I then scan my work and mirrored them in photoshop hence creating this mirrored effect.

Week 3: Nature

The fashion industry has a great impact on our emvironment. Wastes created by fast fashion going into landfill. Chemicals from the fabric dye causes pollution to the water.

As designers we will have to start thinking about what we can do as a student to help minimise the negative impact.

In one of the project i have done, i used many of my dead stock fabrics from my older projects and also uses practice paper from my old practice of chinese calligraphy to create print and embroidery.

With limiting resources, i was still quite satisfied with the result.

Week 4: Cultural Sustainability

When I see this topic, I feel that we all came from a different background growing up from different culture. As a print student growing up from China, to embrace our cultural identity is the way to sustain cultural sustainability.

In my project, I really like to seek inspiration from my culture. In this current project I decided to look into traditional chinese painting of Shan Shui (River and Mountains painting) I did my research on a famous piece called 千里江山圖 （A Thousand Li of River and Mountains) I picked my colour pallet from this painting. Hence I decided to use dark blue and gold in one of my print back ground design.

Week 5: Empathy

Empathy is how we communicate with our audience to create a connection with them emotionally. In one of my previous project on fashion design, I decided to use colours. different colour has different meaning for different culture. The signature one for the Chinese culture is red usually for happiness such as new year and wedding. While for white colour it usually represent death for funeral. This is quite opposite from the western culture where red usually stand for blood and danger while white stands for purity.

In my previous project which is the required us to work with one colour which I chose red as my inspiration is from chinese wedding. but for my topic I actually did arranged marriage which is not a very happy event. I was undecisive to use red or white because forced marriage is just like a funeral to me. Then I chose to use crimson which is a dark shade of red instead where I decided to merge the meaning of the red colour of chinese and western culture.

Reflection

In the Intro to section of the project, I truely enjoyed myself as I get to try different printing methods. And also the design process we get a lot of freedom as we can seek inspiration from all aspects of nature. I changed my topic half way through because I feel like the motif I chose in the beginning are not well thought of. Hence I decided to change my topic to water when I heard that we get to further develop this project later on. After the critique section I also learnt a lot of what i could do later on and what else I should add into my current process. The feedback I got is that I should seek more areas of inspiration but not only constrain myself with just water only. I am really grateful of this feedback because I do also feel that I have constrain my mind in focusing on water to lead my project to the way I wanted it to developed into. And neglected the fact that we are still in a rather free stage to try out different thing with no right or wrong. This also solved my problem of a little stucked in one process and unable to move on. I decided to look more into other part of nature such as animals and ect. After doing some research on animals, I suddenly feel there are more thing I could do than the original topic I chose. This make me reallise the importance of widen my research in the early stage and how it will help to my developement of a project.